README.md

PDF Text Extract

Extract text from pdfs that contain searchable pdf text. The module is wrapper that calls the pdftotext command to perform the actual extraction

Installation

npm install --save pdf-text-extract

You will need the pdftotext binary available on your path. There are packages available for many different operating systems

See https://github.com/nisaacson/pdf-extract#osx for how to install the pdftotext command

Usage

As a module

extract(filePath, [options], [pdftotextcommand], callback)

Options and pdftotextcommand are not required.

var path = require('path')
var filePath = path.join(__dirname, 'test/data/multipage.pdf')
var extract = require('pdf-text-extract')
extract(filePath, function (err, pages) {
  if (err) {
    console.dir(err)
    return
  }
  console.dir(pages)
})

The output will be an array of where each entry is a page of text. If you want just a string of all pages you can set the option to splitPages: false.

var filePath = path.join(__dirname, 'test/data/multipage.pdf')
var extract = require('pdf-text-extract')
extract(filePath, { splitPages: false }, function (err, text) {
  if (err) {
    console.dir(err)
    return
  }
  console.dir(text)
})

You can set the following options:

• firstPage: First page to extract
• lastPage: Last page to extract
• resolution: in dpi, as is specified by pdftotext -r
• crop: Should be an object { x:x, y:y, w:w, h:h }
• layout: Should be either layout, raw or htmlmeta. Default: layout
• encoding: Should be either UCS-2, ASCII7, Latin1, UTF-8, ZapfDingbats or Symbol. Default: UTF-8
• eol: End of line convention. One of either: unix, dos or mac
• ownerPassword: Owner password (for encrypted files)
• userPassword: User password (for encrypted files)
• splitPages: If true, the result will be an array of pages. Default: true.

If needed you can pass optional arguments to the extract function. These will be passed to the child_process.spawn call.

var filePath = path.join(__dirname, 'test/data/multipage.pdf')
var extract = require('pdf-text-extract')
var options = {
  cwd: "./"
}
extract(filePath, options, function (err, pages) {
  if (err) {
    console.dir(err)
    return
  }
  console.dir('extracted pages', pages)
})

You can also override the command for pdftotext if it is installed in a location that is not available in the PATH environment variable

var filePath = path.join(__dirname, 'test/data/multipage.pdf')
var pdfToTextCommand = '/opt/bin/pdftotext'
var extract = require('pdf-text-extract')
var options = {
  cwd: "./"
}
extract(filePath, options, pdfToTextCommand, function (err, pages) {
  if (err) {
    console.dir(err)
    return
  }
  console.dir('extracted pages', pages)
})

ES6 promises are supported. You can now call .then(onFulfilled[, onRejected]):

var filePath = path.join(__dirname, 'test/data/multipage.pdf')
var Extract = require('../index.js')
var extract = new Extract(filePath)

extract.then(function (pages) {
  console.dir('extracted pages', pages)
}).catch(function (err) {
  console.error('error:', err)
})

As a command line tool

npm install -g pdf-text-extract

Execute with the filePath as an argument. Output will be json-formatted array of pages

pdf-text-extract ./test/data/multipage.pdf
# outputs
# ['<page 1 content...>', '<page 2 content...>']

Test

# install dev dependencies
npm install
# run tests
npm test